WAWA/WeAreWideAwake is my Public Service to America as a muckracker who has journeyed seven times to Israel Palestine since June 2005.
WAWA is dedicated to confronting media and governments that shield the whole
truth.

We who Are Wide
Awake are compelled by the "fierce urgency of Now" [Rev MLK, Jr.] to raise
awareness and promote the human dialogue about many of the crucial issues of our
day: the state of our Union and in protection of democracy, what life is like
under military occupation in Palestine, the Christian EXODUS from the Holy Land,
and spirituality-from a Theologically Liberated Christian Anarchist
POV.

"Observe good faith and justice towards all nations; cultivate peace and harmony with all...and passionate attachments for others, should be excluded; and that, in place of them, just and amicable feelings towards all should be cultivated. The nation which indulges towards another a habitual hatred or a habitual fondness is in some degree a slave...a passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils."George Washington's Farewell Address - 1796

We hold these truths to be self-evident: That all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights; that, among these, are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; that, to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; and, whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it. -July 4, 1776. The Declaration of Independence

November 24, 2010: Vanunu and Pollard: Time for Compassion and Common Sense

November 24, 2010: Vanunu and Pollard: Time for Compassion and Common Sense

Jonathan
Jay Pollard was born in 1954 in Texas and grew up in an affluent family in
Indiana. Until 1998 Israel publicly denied that
Pollard was an Israeli spy, although it granted him citizenship in 1995. Last
week the relentless campaign to release Pollard was reignited with a letter
circulated by Rep. Barney Frank and signed by more than 30 Democratic members
of the U.S House of Representatives calling on President Barack Obama to grant
clemency to the confessed spy. This was topped off by Israeli Prime Minister
Binyamin Netanyahu also requesting Obama release Pollard, who was arrested a
quarter century ago on the steps of an Israeli embassy while spying for Israel.

The letter from
congress was written in coordination with the Conference of Presidents of Major
American Jewish Organizations, National Council of Young Israel, B'nai B'rith
International, the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, the Zionist
Organization of America, Agudath Israel, and former presidential candidate Gary
Bauer, who is a fundamentalist Christian Zionist.

They wrote: “It is
indisputable in our view that the nearly twenty-five years that Mr. Pollard has
served stands as a sufficient time from the standpoint of either punishment or
deterrence. In summary, we see clemency for Mr. Pollard as an act of compassion
justified by the way others have been treated by our justice system. We urge
you to use the clemency power in this case.” [See full text and signatures here: http://www.jonathanpollard.org/2010/111810a.htm

According to Ian
Williams' article in the July/Aug. 1993 Washington Report “although Pollard
insists he was motivated by concern for Israeli security, he was paid (and is
still being paid) a handsome salary by the Israeli government. His Israeli
handlers also provided gifts and trips to Europe for Pollard and his wife,
Anne. The severity of Pollard's sentence was based on secret testimony by
[then-Defense Secretary] Caspar Weinberger, who is on record as saying that
Pollard was lucky--he should have received three life sentences. Pollard
provided Israeli intelligence with more than 1,000 classified U.S. documents,
some consisting of hundreds of pages, comprising overall some 360 cubic feet of
paper.

"According to
American investigative reporter Seymour Hersh, Pollard sold information on
nuclear targets in the Soviet Union to Israel. U.S. defense sources suggest
that what caused the most bitter anger against Pollard in the Pentagon and
throughout the American intelligence community was the fact that the
information compromised human agents in the Soviet Union and elsewhere. U.S. intelligence
sources have concluded that the Israeli government bartered this information to
the Soviet Union.” [1]

What ever
information Pollard sold a quarter of a century ago is old news now, as is
everything Vanunu knew about Israel’s Dimona plant where he worked the night
shift as a lowly technician twenty-four years ago.

In April 1999, thirty-six members of the House of Representatives signed a
letter calling for Vanunu's release from prison because they believed "we
have a duty to stand up for men and women like Mordechai Vanunu who dare to
articulate a brighter vision for humanity."

President Clinton responded with a public statement expressing concern for
Vanunu and the need for Israel and other non-parties to the Non-Proliferation
Treaty to adhere to it and accept IAEA safeguards.

During Vanunu's closed door trial, Defense witness and the
Sunday Times journalist who broke Vanunu's story, Peter Hounam, testified that
"We did not pay him money, but only covered his expenses... Money did not
motivate him."

Sunday Times journalist Wendy Robbins wrote, "Mordechai never asked for
nor received a single penny for his information... he blurted out the whole
tale without first setting out any financial preconditions. Mordechai got
nothing out of the whole episode. He never `sold' Israel's secrets -- he told
them."

Vanunu told me, "All the secrets I had were published in 1989 in an
important book, by [Nuclear Physicist] Frank Barnaby, The Invisible Bomb:
Nuclear Arms Race in the Middle East."

Barnaby testified, "I found Vanunu very straightforward about his motives
for violating Israel's secrecy laws he explained to me that he believed that
both the Israeli and the world public had the right to know about the
information he passed on. He seemed to me to be acting ideologically.

"Israel's political leaders have, he said, consistently lied about
Israel's nuclear-weapons programme and he found this unacceptable in a
democracy. The knowledge that Vanunu had about Israel's nuclear weapons, about
the operations at Dimona, and about security at Dimona could not be of any use
to anyone today. He left Dimona in October 1985." [2]

Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute,
Doug Bandow wrote in, Trade Mordechai Vanunu for Jonathan Pollard that
Vanunu “immigrated to Australia, converted to Christianity, and traveled to
Great Britain after meeting a journalist for the Sunday Times who was
interested in his story. Vanunu's account made the paper's front page, but a
Mossad agent convinced him to join her in Rome, from which he was kidnapped,
drugged, and returned to Israel. Shimon Peres, usually seen as a liberal
peacenik, apparently insisted on Vanunu's seizure.”

Before
quitting the Dimona, Vanunu shot 56 photos in top-secret
locations and also exposed how lax SECURITY was, for he obtained the keys to
the top-secret locations when a supervisor carelessly left them in the shower
room.

Vanunu’s photos
and testimony proved to nuclear physicists that Israel had become a major
nuclear power by stockpiling between 100 and 200 atomic bombs within the seven
underground levels where plutonium production, and secret nuclear weapons were
assembled without any knowledge, debate or authorization from its own citizens.
Israel has yet to allow International Inspectors into the aged Dimona plant,
which is leaking and endangering the health of its own citizens.

In 1963, when Vanunu was nine years old
the Zionists came to his home town of Marrakesh and convinced his Orthodox
father to abandon his general store and pack up the first seven of his eleven
children for the land of milk and honey. Instead, the Vanunu's were banished to
the desert of Beesheva, an ethnically cleansed Palestinian village.

A few months later, Shimon Peres, then Israel's Deputy Minister of Defense met
with President John Kennedy, inside the White House.

Kennedy told Peres, "You know that we follow very closely the discovery of
any nuclear development in the region. This could create a very dangerous
situation. For this reason we monitor your nuclear effort. What could you tell
me about this?"

Peres replied, "I can tell you most clearly that we will not introduce
nuclear weapons to the region, and certainly we will not be the first."

By September of 1986, Peres was convulsing over Vanunu, who had been employed
as a lowly tech in his progeny; Israel’s clandestine underground nuclear
weapons centre in the Negev called the Dimona.

Peres ordered the Mossad, to "Bring the son of a bitch back here."

Peres ordered Vanunu's kidnapping that included a clubbing, drugging and being
flung upon an Israeli cargo boat back to Israel for a closed-door trial, 18
years in jail, six years under 24/7 surveillance and another 78 days in solitary confinement that began 23 May 2010.

On 11 October 2010, Israel denied Vanunu’s
appeal to leave the state. Also in October, it was announced that Vanunu was awarded the 2010 Carl‐von‐Ossietzky‐Medal which he is to be awarded in Berlin on 12 December 2010.

Within days of the announcement of a
record 205 nominations for 2009’s Nobel Peace Prize, [one of several prizes
endowed by Swedish industrialist and dynamite inventor Alfred Nobel] Vanunu declined that honor in a letter to the Nobel
Peace Prize Committee in Oslo:

"I am asking the committee to remove my name from the nominations...I cannot
be part of a list of laureates that includes Simon Peres…Peres established and
developed the atomic weapon program in Dimona in Israel…Peres was the man who
ordered [my] kidnapping, he continues to oppose my freedom and release. WHAT I WANT
IS FREEDOM AND ONLY FREEDOM. FREEDOM AND ONLY FREEDOM I NEED NOW."

On 22 November
2010, I mailed the following:

Dear President
Obama, Vice President Biden, Secretary of State Clinton,

"As the
only nuclear power to have used a nuclear weapon, the United States has a moral
responsibility to act…When we fail to pursue peace, then it stays forever
beyond our grasp. We know the path when we choose fear over hope. To denounce
or shrug off a call for cooperation is an easy but also cowardly thing to do.
That’s how wars begin. That’s where human progress ends…the voices of peace and
progress must be raised together…Human destiny will be what we make of it…Words
must mean something."- President Obama, Prague, April 5, 2009.

As a child of the
Cold War, I share the Dream of multitudes; who share the Dream Vanunu dreamt in
1985-of a Nuclear Free World.

Please help FREE
VANUNU NOW so that he can personally receive the Carl Von Ossietzky Medal in
Berlin on 12 December 2010.

Most sincerely,

Eileen Fleming,
Founder of WeAreWideAwake.org
Staff Member of Salem-news.com
A Feature Correspondent for Arabisto.com

"HOPE has two children.The first is ANGER at the way things are. The second is COURAGE to DO SOMETHING about it."-St. Augustine

"He who is not angry when there is just cause for anger is immoral. Why? Because anger looks to the good of justice. And if you can live amid injustice without anger, you are immoral as well as unjust." - Aquinas

Everyone has the right to freedom of
opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions
without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and
ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

" In the final analysis, it is between you and God. It was never between you and them anyway."-Mother Teresa

“You cannot talk like sane men around a peace table while the atomic bomb itself is ticking beneath it. Do not treat the atomic bomb as a weapon of offense; do not treat it as an instrument of the police. Treat the bomb for what it is: the visible insanity of a civilization that has ceased...to obey the laws of life.”- Lewis Mumford, 1946

The age of warrior kings and of warrior presidents has passed. The nuclear age calls for a different kind of leadership....a leadership of intellect, judgment, tolerance and rationality, a leadership committed to human values, to world peace, and to the improvement of the human condition. The attributes upon which we must draw are the human attributes of compassion and common sense, of intellect and creative imagination, and of empathy and understanding between cultures." - William Fulbright

“Any nation that year after year continues to raise the Defense budget while cutting social programs to the neediest is a nation approaching spiritual death.” - Rev. MLK

Establishment of Israel

"On the day of the termination of the British mandate and on the strength of the United Nations General Assembly declare The State of Israel will be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel: it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion it will guarantee freedom of religion [and] conscience and will be faithful to the Charter of the United Nations." - May 14, 1948. The Declaration of the Establishment of Israel